Revit, sustainable design, digital musings

Tag Archives: RevitRaw

For many versions of Revit, we have used Steve Stafford’s Line-Based Generic Model family for representing Egress Paths in our life safety drawings. It has served us well. At the time, this was absolutely the best way, given the available tool set. Certainly, you could use dumb drafting lines to sketch the path, and not have any ability to schedule or tag… but we like BIM here at Paradigm shift, and strongly believe in creating your own tools when they don’t already exist.

Revit 2013 has opened up some new possibilities. With railings, you can now schedule and tag their length. Mathew Miller wrote up a great process for documenting Life Safety / Code plans, and you should definitely check it out. Then go follow him on Twitter.

Are you back? Good. Yes, I completely agree – one could simply create a custom railing for the path. I liked this quite a bit, and the more I tried refining it, the more I didn’t like the ability to edit certain aspects. The new component-based railings cannot entirely have all components turned off – there’s always a rail at the overall height of the instance.

I think the best solution I’ve come across thus far, is from one of NBBJ’s own – Kelvin Tam in our Columbus office. It is made from an adaptive component, so the points can be placed manually where needed, and easily adjusted. There’s also some additional benefits to using this method, as you’ll see in my short video. This is a rough draft, and comments are always welcome.